I write book reviews for all types of books. Mainly, mystery/thriller, Contemporary and Historical fiction, Biography/Memoir and True Crime, and a little Romance, too!

Flashback Friday

Flashback Friday

Spices & Seasons

Spices & Seasons

Monday, May 21, 2018

The Prince by Katharine Ashe- Feature and Review

ABOUT THE BOOK:

The temptation of her lips…

Libby Shaw refuses to accept society’s dictates. She’s determined to become a member of Edinburgh’s all-male Royal College of Surgeons. Disguising herself as a man, she attends the surgical theater and fools everyone—except the one man who has never forgotten the shape of her exquisitely sensual lips.

…will make a prince say yes to her every desire

Forced to leave his home as a boy, famed portraitist Ziyaeddin is secretly the exiled prince of a distant realm. When he first met Libby, he memorized every detail of her face and drew her. But her perfect lips gave him trouble—the same lips he now longs to kiss. When Libby asks his help to hide her feminine identity from the world, Ziyaeddin agrees on one condition: she must sit for him to paint—as a woman. But what begins as a daring scheme could send them both hurtling toward danger…and an unparalleled love.READ AND EXCERPT:

September 1825

Surgeons’ Hall

Edinburgh, Scotland

Neck cloths were a lot tighter than she had imagined. And
trousers pinched a person right up the center of where she least wanted to be
pinched.

But no one had noticed her. Even the students on the benches
to either side, murmuring to their companions about the dissection in the
center of the U-shaped operating theater, had not glanced twice at her.

Obviously the whiskers had been a stroke of brilliance.

Nevertheless, Libby Shaw kept her shoulders hunched and head
bent, peeking at the demonstration from beneath the concealing rim of her cap.
As the surgeon peeled away the muscle to expose bone, a shiver of pleasure
fanned through her.

She had sat in this theater before to watch public
dissections and surgeries. Disguised as a man now, it all felt different: the
medical men with their wise brows and hands that worked miracles; the
scratching of students’ pencils in notebooks; the cringes of the curious public
drawn to the lecture; and the stench of the flesh on the table, slowed in its
natural decay by the cool cellar in which the surgical assistant stored it each
afternoon to preserve it for the following day’s lecture.

For a sennight already, Edinburgh’s most celebrated surgeons
had been performing a system-by-system dissection, but Libby had not bothered
attending until today, the day reserved for her favorite part: the skeletal
system. The human skeleton was sturdy, stable, such a pleasure to study.

“That is the fibula,” the young man on her left whispered to
his companion.

“It is?” the other whispered uncertainly.

No.

Libby bit her lips together. The whiskers disguised her
face, not her voice.

“Of course, numbskull,” the first one said. She recognized
that haughty tone. She had met plenty of this sort when her father invited his
students to dinner. They thought their arrogance impressed her.

“I’ve been to dozens of these dissections already,” he
added.

Yet he did not know a fibula from a tibia.

“What’s that?” the other whispered, pointing.

The soleus.

“The tibialis anterior,” the haughty one said. “Clearly you
haven’t read Charles Bell’s A System of Dissections.”

Clearly he hadn’t either.

Their whispers had grown louder. Libby inched forward on the
bench and turned her ear toward the floor below.

“Watch, Pulley,” the haughty one said. “Now he will use the
lithotomy forceps to pluck out the muscle.”

Libby jerked her chin aside.

“He will not,” she whispered in a low pitch . “He will use
the curved knife to protect the muscle while exposing the bone. Now do be quiet
so the rest of us can hear.” She turned her face back toward the stage. She
wasn’t here to admonish ill-informed students. She was here to learn.

With each new revelation the lecturing surgeon offered,
Libby scribed a detailed note, carefully lining up each sentence at the left
margin, to be easily readable later. Finally the surgeon draped a linen cloth
over the table, and the hall erupted in applause.

“This calls for a pint,” the haughty student said, as though
he’d done the dissection himself.

“Invite the new lad?” his friend said with a glance at her
as she closed her notebook and stood.

The arrogant lip curled. “The riffraff can find their own
pub.”

They moved off.

“Dinna fret o’er Cheddar,” a youth said cheerfully beside
her. “He’s a bushel o’ mean stuffed into a barrel o’ privilege. Family’s got
money an’ he’s clever as a fox. Doesna think he’s got to be decent to anybody.
Good on you to take him down a peg, lad.”

She could not pretend the youth was not speaking to her.
Reaching up, she touched the brim of her cap. For weeks she had studied men’s
gestures, as well as their gaits and facial movements, then practiced them
before a mirror.

“Fine grip you’ve got there, Joe! I always say you know the
measure o’ a man by his handshake. Matriculating this session?”

In her dreams.

She nodded.

“Excellent,” Archie declared. “Always happy to meet a bloke
cleverer than me, ’less it’s Cheddar,” he said with a wink, and clapped Libby
on the shoulder, sending her lurching forward. “The lads are off to the Dug’s
Bone for a pint. Got to wash away the stink,” he said jauntily. “Join us.”

“Obliged,” she said, and he moved off.

Euphoria bubbled up in her. All three students had believed
she was a man!

The disguise did not, however, solve her greatest problem:
finding a surgeon with whom to apprentice. For that she needed connections in
Edinburgh’s surgical community. Those connections would also pave the path to
enrolling in courses on anatomy, surgery, and chemistry to augment her
apprenticeship. Miss Elizabeth Shaw, daughter of renowned forensic physician
John Shaw, had those sorts of connections in spades. The newly created and
entirely friendless Joseph Smart did not.

But women were not allowed to apprentice as surgeons. Thus
her disguise.

Below, only two students were asking questions of the lecturing
surgeon. Questions crowded her own head, yet boys like Archie Armstrong didn’t
even bother staying to learn more.

As Elizabeth Shaw, she had never met this surgeon. She could
chance asking her questions without being recognized. Tucking her notebook beneath
her arm and starting toward the stair, she cut a swift glance across the
thinning crowd.

Her steps faltered.

A man sat across the theater, alone as the tiers emptied.

It was not because he was the only person Libby recognized
in the place that she abruptly could not move. For he was not. She had noticed
several of her father’s friends in the crowd.

And she did not halt because this man was attractive; for he
was, with a strong tapering jaw, black hair swept back from his brow, and
deep-set eyes. His arms clad in a fine coat and crossed loosely over his chest
were muscular, and the crisp white of his cravat shone brilliantly against his
skin. Libby had never particularly cared about external beauty; her interest
was a body’s health. And she had been stared at before. It was not due to his
dark gaze trained upon her that she remained paralyzed.

Her feet would not move now because in that gaze was
thorough recognition. He knew her.

They had met only once, two and a half years ago,
exceedingly briefly. Yet the gleam in his hooded eyes now told her that he knew
her at this moment to be Elizabeth Shaw.

With a regal nod he offered her a slow, confident smile of
pure deviltry.

Panic seized her. It required only a single person to unmask
her. If she did not move swiftly now, this man with the keen eyes and dangerous
smile would.

* * *

Except for the whiskers, she was perfect.

Watching her across the theater, Ziyaeddin wondered if she
knew the whiskers were horrendous. But they helped serve her purpose: none of
the men here realized that a female hid as one of them. None save he.

For two hours the attention of every person in the theater
had been on the demonstration. Although Ziyaeddin preferred the earlier stages
of a surgical dissection, when the body was whole and the muscles still plump
with blood, he appreciated the entire series. A man could not properly depict
the exterior without knowing what lay beneath.

Also, Edinburgh’s medical community was large,
sophisticated, and prosperous. He had friends as well as patrons among the men
here. It was useful to occasionally be seen in public.

And then there was the girl.

With a sober face she had listened to the lecturing surgeon,
scribbling in a notebook set atop her trouser-clad knees, making no move that
might reveal her femininity. But he knew the girl beneath that disguise. He had
once encountered her at Haiknayes Castle, the home of the Duke and Duchess of
Loch Irvine. He remembered her perfectly.

Her fingers clutching pencil and notebook were long with
very short nails, and darker than the visible bits of her fair chin and cheeks.
The nose was neither large nor pert. The eyes, shaded by her hat, were
almond-shaped, narrowing in the centers at equivalent arcs toward the dip at
the bridge of her nose, the left a bit smaller than the right. The lashes and
eye color he could not discern at this distance, but he knew them to be,
respectively, golden brown and brilliant blue. The whiskers obscured her lips.

Those lips had given him trouble.

Considerable trouble.

Her father, John Shaw, was a respected physician. Ziyaeddin
considered the likelihood that Dr. Shaw was aware his daughter now attended a
surgical dissection dressed in men’s clothing. From even the little Ziyaeddin
knew of Miss Elizabeth Shaw: probably not.

She gazed with longing at the stragglers lingering about the
lecturer. She mustn’t realize how obviously her face showed that longing. He
should probably tell her. That, and he needed to have another look at those
lips.

Those lips.

Abruptly she turned her head and met his gaze, and the
beautifully mobile features went stone still. Recognition sparked in the blue.

Aha. So she remembered him. No doubt she treasured the
picture of her face that he had drawn at Haiknayes, probably keeping it in an
intimate location: her bedside table or between the pages of her diary.
Portraits by “the Turk” were coveted by ladies throughout Scotland and England.
It was part of his mystique to rarely do likenesses of individual women, so
that when he did they were especially valuable.

He inclined his head.

With a vexed glance at the lecturing floor below, she
hurried from the hall.

Taking up his walking stick, he went out, greeting
acquaintances along the way. The usual pain assailed him; he could never sit
for long without it. He ignored it. He had far more interesting things to
ponder now, two things: an upper lip and a lower lip.

By the time he came onto the street she had disappeared.
Amidst the bustle of pedestrians, horses, and vehicles, he could not see her.
Then, abruptly, through the window of a bookshop, he did.

A youth with a tight hat and too many whiskers stared at him
above the edge of an open volume. The fire in the intelligent eyes dared him to
reveal her.

Opening the door, he entered and looked into Elizabeth
Shaw’s scruffy face.

The hat was a clever contrivance, and like her cravat and
coat, both of fine quality and understated. But the moustaches were all wrong,
fashioned of goat’s hair, and too coarse and ashy, and did not suit the golden
strands of hair visible betwixt cap and collar. To conceal her smooth skin she
had exaggerated the side whiskers till they were as thick and long as a
sailor’s.

He bowed. “Good day.”

She ducked her head, moved around him, and darted out of the
shop.

He followed.

As he half expected and half hoped, she was waiting for him
in an alley not far away. Entering the secluded close he went toward her.

“You mustn’t tell my father,” she said without preamble. It
did not surprise him. When they had spoken so briefly at Haiknayes she had been
unconcerned with regular manners too.

“The color of the whiskers is unsuitable,” he said.

Her nose crinkled. “It is?”

“It needs more yellow.” Yellow ochre. And perhaps a touch of
raw sienna.

She seemed to consider this. “I suppose you would know that,
being a portrait artist.”

“I would indeed,” he said, bridling his amusement.

“Credible whiskers are remarkably difficult to come by.”
There was no anger in the eyes now, only earnest concern. “How did you
recognize me?”

He stepped forward, closing the distance between them so
that the precise shape and hues of her lips became clear to him—beautiful lips:
nothing like the current fashion for red bows, instead wide and lushly pink.

“I have cause to know these lips well.” Yet not well enough.

Before his encounter with Elizabeth Shaw at Haiknayes
Castle, he had never seen a woman’s lips and wanted immediately to touch them.
Draw: yes. Paint: certainly. Touch: never.

“And these eyes,” he added, because she was an unusual
little woman and she did something to him—something alarming yet wholly
pleasurable. She quickened his pulse.

And she made him want to stand in an alleyway chatting about
false whiskers.

“Of course I remember. I am not in my dotage, and you gave
the picture to me. My father believed one of my friends drew it. He put a frame
on it and hung it in the parlor. I pretended it fell off the wall while being
dusted and the glass shattered. I told him I would take it to the shop to have
the glass replaced but I threw it in the trash bin.”

He laughed.

Her brows perked. “You are not offended?”

“Of course not.”

“Truly?”

“If I wished, I could draw your face a hundred more times.”

She blinked. “I must go.” She glanced toward the alley’s
end. “I’ve elsewhere to be just now.”

“A gentlemen’s club?” He folded his arms. “Or a gaming hell?
Perhaps the local public house?”

The lips twitched. “That is the simplest kind of humor.”

“Well, you don’t plan to attend a ladies’ sewing circle in
this ensemble.” He allowed his gaze to travel down the heavy coat and trousers.
She had most certainly bound her breasts, but there was no disguising the
subtle flare of her hips. “Do you?”

“You are absurd. You won’t tell anybody, will you?”

She had no reason to expect his discretion. And he was
enjoying the dart that formed at the bridge of her nose, the shape of it like a
pair of stalwart lovers forever separated by a mountain. Her beauty was
conventional, a mingling of Scottish clarity and English delicacy. Yet the
changeability of her features fascinated him.

He found any sort of freedom of motion maddening—and
inspiring.

“I should like to know the reason for your disguise,” he
said.

“I wanted to assess whether I could pass as a man,” she said
in a tone that suggested she thought him a simpleton. Yet her eyes shone not
with insult but sincerity.

“Congratulations for succeeding,” he said. “Almost.”

“I might as easily ask what you were doing there.”

“Enjoying the vision of a pretty girl disguised as a youth.”

Like sunlight sparking off the Mediterranean, her eyes
flared. Abruptly she moved past him. He watched her lithe legs and straight
back and stride that was far too confident for a woman.

“Miss Shaw, forgive my impertinence.”

She paused. “I saw the portrait you did of the duke and
duchess. It is very good.”

That portrait of the Duke and Duchess of Loch Irvine was not
“very good.” It was brilliant. Light and dark. Mystery and familiarity. Action
and peace. Passion and reason. He had painted every facet of the pair in
sublime balance.

Looking into the bright eyes now, he saw that Miss Shaw was
well aware of this.

So this little woman of the earnest brow knew how to tease
too. He should have anticipated that.

His body’s reaction to this realization was, however,
something of a surprise. Perhaps those slender legs were the trouble. Or
thoughts of her breasts. Or the plump curve of her lower lip. Or the fact that
she was standing before him dressed as a boy, duping everyone, yet apparently
expecting him to keep her confidence…

This is the fourth book in the ‘Devil’s Duke’ series. I don’t know why, but I thought the last book was a wrap on the series. I suppose it could be because there are so many ‘trilogies’ in the historical romance genre, the idea of an ongoing saga just never occurred to me. But, I was very delighted to learn there would be at least one more book in the series.

I had no idea which direction Ashe would decide on, but I never would have dreamed we would have a prince with an artistic flair, living in exile- if that’s the right word, and a woman so desperate to become a doctor/surgeon she attempts to live as a man. Talk about an odd couple!!

For me, though, I thought this book was a little outside the box, unique, and perhaps unusual. That’s a good thing. Historical romance needs a little shot of that type of adrenaline. Some of the characters in the book are based on real people, and it is important to note that I used the word ‘based’. This is not a true account of anyone’s life, but a real person did inspire the author to build a ‘fictional’ story around true events and people.

As to the ‘Prince’… Well, I prefer my heroes to be conflicted, to have heavy issues to contend with, to be tortured souls. I’ll take that over some coddled, rogue Viscount who blames his father’s neglect for his own promiscuity. How many times has that been done? I can’t count that high, actually. So, give me a character like Ziyaeddin. A guy with a sensitive, artistic nature, who is more patient than he lets on, but one who also happens to be carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders.

Libby was refreshing in that she was not exactly socialized, was raised unconventionally, and didn’t really have a filter. Some of the things that popped out her mouth were not ladylike, but I had to admire her forthrightness. However, it should be noted that while Libby is very smart, she is single-minded in her determination to achieve her goals, and as such, she may exhibit some traits we might characterize or perhaps diagnose as ‘Aspergers Syndrome’. (OCD characteristics are evident as well.)

I wasn’t sure, at first, if this couple could be compatible, could cook up a little chemistry considering they are both slaves to individual secrets that, if exposed, would upend their lives, put them in danger, and shatter all their hopes and dreams. But, as Ziyaeddin obsesses over Libby’s lips, as the two of them converse, (whether Z wanted to or not), the attraction between them practically leaps off the pages.

Both of these characters are coping with situations quite out of the ordinary for this genre! Yes! Yes! Yes! The secondary characters are strong and wonderfully written, as well, and played key roles in the story.

This is really a wonderful love story!! I had to be convinced, as I was pretty skeptical, but the story is so rich in details and so vivid, and original, I found myself totally caught up in all the intrigue.

There are some thought provoking messages embedded in the story, as well, which gives it an added layer of depth and emotion. The wonderful happily ever after could n‘t have been more fitting, uplifting, or sigh worthy!!

Katharine Ashe is the USA Today bestselling author of the acclaimed Devil's Duke series and more than a dozen other historical romances reviewers call “intensely lush” and “sensationally intelligent.” A professor of European history and popular culture, she writes fiction because she adores the grand adventures and breathtaking sensuality of historical romance.

Katharine is a two-time finalist for the prestigious RITA® Award of the Romance Writers of America, a four-time nominee in the Reviewers’ Choice Awards -- including winner for Best Historical Romantic Adventure -- and her novels The Duke and How to Be a Proper Lady have been honored on Amazon's Best Romances of 2012 and 2017 lists. Her books are recommended by Woman’s World Magazine, USA Today, Publishers Weekly, Booklist, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, All About Romance and many others, and translated into languages around the world.

Wearing her other hat (rather, tam!), as a professor of history and popular culture Katharine teaches courses on the history of romance fiction, religion in film and fiction, and creative writing at Duke University. She co-founded and runs Duke's UNSUITABLE Speakers Series about women, history, and popular fiction, and she writes publicly and teaches workshops on women's history, feminism, romance, and writing. She is also the convenor and moderator of Facebook's Feminist Romance Book Club.

Katharine lives in the wonderfully warm Southeast with her husband, son, dog, and a garden she likes to call romantic rather than unkempt. She loves meeting readers in person, and connecting with readers by mail and email and on social media too!

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I am married with two grown children, I have two dogs and three cats, I collect vintage paperbacks, I read, and write reviews, blog, promote across social media. I am a top Amazon and Goodreads reviewer.

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